I like the English language. When used properly, it is a very rich culmination of many other Indo-European languages. Thanks to Bob Sutor's Open Blog, I've found a very nice compendium of common usage errors, "Common Errors in English" by Paul Brians, Professor of English at Washington State University. Check it out. Communicate clearly.

The sun just came out, pushing the marine layer of fog off past the horizon. I can see from Fitzgerald Marine Reserve to the Farollone Islands.

Devil's Slide reopended today. My neighbor reports that it's a beautiful job.

I can just feel the housing bubble swelling just a bit. Yep, Zillow says my house is worth 50K$ more than last month.

Just to help out a fellow Coastsider, wiki(Polyethylene_terephthalate,PET) is PolyEthyleneTerephthalate. Steve, follow the link to wikipedia, and then keep following links until you finally get to an hint of an answer to the question you raised in "Recycling".

Over the centuries, high profile, highly sought after, highly priced products become commodities. Spices may be the first example. Salt and black pepper were once rare and expensive items; now, they are commodities throughout much of the world. More recently we have seen the same process happen to photocopiers and telecommunications equipment. It's happening with computer hardware, and it looks as though software will follow.

How do companies survive commoditization of their industry?

I've always liked the restaurant analogy; though I don't know where I first heard it. A restaurant faced with declining business can do one of two things.

• They can reduce costs, lower prices and hope to make up the profits through quantity. This usually means lower quality or less exotic ingredients, and less experienced staff.
• They can increase the "top line" by increasing service and actually raising prices. Go after the high end market.

Consider the telecommunications industry. During the Internet Bubble years, the PBXs, switching equipment and networking gear were fast becoming commodities. Margins were shrinking to less than 10%. VAR sale personnel were accustomed to giving away system engineering and design services, but the margins were no longer there to cover such benefits. The largest deals generally lost money because of the "freebies" that were traditionally thrown in. The only way to get around this was to add services. Outsourcing of Move/Add/Changes was the traditional service offered. But innovation in developing "high end" products and services that truly changed the nature of the business was needed. Most large companies can't accomplish this, and consolidation is the result. Either in one large company acquiring other large companies, or larger companies hoping to make up for their lack of innovation by acquiring small and start-up firms. Sometimes this works, sometimes not. The process takes years.

We're still waiting to see what companies survive and what innovation will bring.

We've recently recorded a conversation in a café and we're now learning the open source software Audacity in an attempt to clean it up. It may not be the easiest listening, but we think our upcoming podcast(s) will be very interesting.

Audacity is a very powerful program, but there just doesn't seem to be any way to remove noise that is quantitatively similar to the signal [voices ordering coffee as noise, voices discussing open source as signal].

But that's OK. We're learning. And the one thing that I have learned about myself is that I enjoy learning, more than doing. That's why I made the move to information mangement from aerospace - quicker learning curve required, over and over again.